East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Clark & Carole

Yesterday I gave myself a little gift – my new Italian indie ebook is doing decently, so why not? – and so I bought me a copy of the classic 1974 double biography by Warren G. Harris Gable & Lombard.
It was the proper thing to do, considering yesterday was the 75th anniversary of Lombard’s death, and the ebook edition is very cheap at 2.99.

I was initially skeptical about this book, being under the (wrong, it turned out) impression this biography was the basis for the unspeakably bad 1976 movie “Gable and Lombard”, by Sidney J. Furie.Apparently, the Furie movie had nothing to do with Harris’ book – not only in the sense that it had very little to do with Gable and Lombard in the first place but really, apart from the title, Furie and his team never even touched the biography. The movie is notoriously full of factual errors and gives a very poor image of the two stars, and it was savaged by, among others, Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael.